by Adam Hall
Yashenko had gone quiet and I spun the thumb wheel because it was possible he was now in touch with the two other aircraft. The contrails were expanding slowly and I could now see the machines themselves, small black shapes silhouetted against the white plumes they were leaving behind them across the sky.
I had to assume they were Foxbats, since according to NATO Intelligence reports that was the only aircraft capable of gaining on me so fast at my present airspeed of 1200 knots.
I watched the mirrors.
— Ko — Can you hear -
I waited.
This is General Yashenko. Can you hear me?
I can — times — but -
You are ordered to land your machine immediately.
One of the doors slammed in my mind: one of the doors to survival. I’d been expecting the order but not so early. Something had started travelling faster than the three of us up here, some new element of intelligence.
I didn’t reply.
The two aircraft were now beginning to come up on me and their shapes were in each of the three mirrors, quite large configurations with rectangular sides and inclined tail fins, perfectly outlined against their white contrails.
Colonel Voronov. You are ordered to land immediately.
Sometimes a few seconds are worth saving and I moved the thumb wheel across and across a ten-degree arc as I spoke.
Suggest contact — base commander at — or — yevsk satellite field. My — to remain on — mission -
I set the wheel and concentrated on the two Foxbats as they drew gradually abreast, one on each side at a distance of something like a hundred yards. I could make out the pilots’ heads: the one on the left had his face turned to watch me and I thought I saw his hand waving. I waved back. The one on the right was also waving, with a distinctive hand motion pointing over and down, over and down. I suppose they were calling me up and not getting any answer. I waved again to acknowledge and then checked instruments and made a calculation on the log. The city of Yelingrad was twelve minutes ahead if I remained on course and the white ridges of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range were moving into the bottom right-hand corner of the windscreen.
General Yashenko to Colonel Voronov, aircraft SX454 -
I took a quick look at the Foxbat on the right and saw the pilot signal again, his hand jerking impatiently. Below him was the glint of grey water as we flew parallel with Lake Balkhash, and I checked the green-code map for the last time.
— I personally order you to land immediately.
Connors had told me to yell at them and show my authority but I was outranked and there wasn’t any point in using the radio again because the two interceptors had been sent up here to signal me what I had to do. There was a fractional delay when I hit the throttle to the end of the quadrant and the Mach number swept up and held there while I pulled the stick back and watched the nose come up and the dark cloud swing across the windscreen.
Action is always faster than reaction and I had the Finback streaking over into a left-hand roll before the other two aircraft showed any change in their attitude. They were still in level flight as I met the wall of the cloud at an angle and ran into total obscurity.
The cloud-face had been ten or twelve miles away when I’d started the manoeuvre and it had taken upwards of twenty-five seconds to cover the distance but the interceptors must have lost something like a fifth of that period in total reaction time from the alert in the pilot’s brain to the start of military power and for the moment they’d lost me.
The tight swing of the turns had sent the blood into my legs and the g-suit was swelling and compressing them but there was a tendency to blackout and the bellow of the jets kept fading and coming back as I tried to keep my eyes open and couldn’t manage it, too much singing, the head dropping on one side, it doesn’t really matter because everything’s — it does matter — singing softly and the light — it does matterpull out of it pull yourself out of this — the head coming up and the panel lights glowing below the blank windscreen and reflecting down from the canopy as the thunder of the jets came back and I shifted the controls and set the Finback into an inverted downward curve because I had to get out of this cloud and get out fast: I was still on their ground radar and they could reach me with a blind-flying missile if they decided to get one off.
White ice was forming on the outside of the canopy and I flipped the lever for defrost and began watching the altimeter: the cloud base had looked something like ten thousand feet high when I’d last seen it but at one thousand knots airspeed I was being taken down so fast that I could find cloud at zero feet at the point where I came out. There were voices in the headset but the cloud was putting out too much static and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Assume they are ordering a kill.
Six thousand feet and going down like a stone.
Five thousand.
The city of Yelingrad should be somewhere east by south but the compass had been shaken up by the turns and the aircraft was still at an acute angle of descent and half-way through a curve designed to bring me put at two thousand feet in level flight but you don’t take this big a chance on instruments alone and I was easing the stick forward at four thousand feet.
Three thousand and bright light burst against the screen and I saw low hills and the snows of a mountain range much higher and to the left. If the two interceptors had taken up pursuit I wouldn’t see them from here: they’d have had to make a similar trajectory and by now they’d be thirty or forty thousand feet above me and possibly inside the cloud, but in a few seconds I ought to start watching the minors because they were faster than I was and if they came up behind me again they could float a missile at me without even taking aim. The compass had steadied and gave a reading of 106 degrees but it didn’t mean anything because the roll had taken me two or three thousand feet north of my original course and the blackout had lasted several seconds and I didn’t know what the Finback had been doing while I was out. The weather had been moving in from the south and the only feature I could see clearly was the range of white peaks dead ahead of me and they had to be the Khrebet Tarbagatay, fifteen miles beyond Yelingrad. It was a fix and I continued level flight at close to Mach 3.5, still using a lot of the gravity I’d picked up from the thirty-thousand-foot dive. The ground features were streaming past the canopy when I looked down but I saw the missile because it was ahead of me and just lifting from the launcher two thousand feet below. It was long and thin and white and my instinct was to kick the controls and get out of its way but that would be fatal because it could home on me wherever I went.
I watched it.
At this airspeed forward and the speed of the missile upward the collision point was seven or eight seconds away and I decided to remain on course for four seconds and try to judge the closeness of the thing by noting its size. This wouldn’t be easy because the combined speed at point of impact would in the region of three thousand knots and the process of vision is not instantaneous: the brain has a mass of computing to do when the eye sees a moving object.
I sat waiting. The idea, Thompson had told me over his cup of tea, is to leave it as late as you can.
It was now very hot inside the cockpit because I’d left the defroster going and a trickle of sweat had reached a corner of my eye and there wasn’t time to do anything about it. A stray thought was trying to come in but I blocked it and flicked a glance at the fuel gauges for the inboard tanks because at low altitude and military speed this Finback used three thousand gallons per hour and I couldn’t sustain this speed for more than nine minutes longer.
Three seconds.
Stray thought Resist: irrelevant.
The missile had canted over to the vertical and was well clear of the launcher and from this distance it looked like a white telegraph pole rising from the background of low hills. The warhead would not be nuclear because you can kill off any given aircraft with a prescribed minimal charge of conventional explosive but the result would be as
effective and I became aware of my position here in the air and my relationship with the data streaming into the senses: the undulating hills and the idea of green grass and the summertimes of youth, kite-flying under the drifting cumulus; the sound of the engines that were driving me so tumultuously across the planet’s surface towards the point of extinction; the feel of the pressure suit and the back of the seat connecting me to the mundane world of engineering while the psyche began its last long scream of terror inside the organism.
Two seconds.
Stray thought persisting: yes, it had been the time factor I’d been overlooking since I’d breached the invisible frontier and entered Soviet airspace unmolested, because these people were now ordered to kill and they must therefore be certain who I was. They would deal with a rebellious pilot of their own forces less drastically, leading him down with their interceptors or simply waiting till he ran out of fuel: the quartermaster general of the Soviet Air Command would know better than anyone how much these aircraft cost and they weren’t to be thrown away. So now I knew this: that the element of intelligence that had out paced me from Furstenfeldbruck had now been examined and assessed and was still in time to hurl a missile into the sky above Yelingrad.
Behrendt had broken.
One second.
Behrendt had broken and not long ago, holding out as far as the edge of lunacy and at the final moment saving enough of his mind for them to ravage.
When did this aircraft take-off? Pain beyond comprehension, the body disintegrating. What is its mission? If I tell them, what will be left of me to go on living? Is the pilot an American? Stop just let them stop just let them stop just let them stop. Throw water. Quickly throw more water.
So that was the time factor I’d got wrong. When I’d crossed the frontier without drawing their fire I’d assumed that security had never been breached, that Behrendt was no longer a threat. But at that time they were still working on him and he’d broken only an hour ago, or half an hour, in time for the information to be flashed through the priority signals network and trigger the long white cylinder that was gliding upward and towards me now, curving slowly into the windscreen with the silence of a shark.
Zero seconds.
The idea is to leave it as late as you can, so when you go into the turn you’re as close to the missile as you can get.
I watched it coming, through the clear glass of the windscreen. It was turning slowly at the command of the electronic guidance system, the pointed nose tilting to focus on the target and the fins swinging into line behind it. The trickle of sweat at the corner of my left eye had begun stinging but I had to ignore it because this was the time when an estimation had to be made about the size of the missile and its closeness: the delay of four seconds before starting to avoid it had been arbitrary, a desperate attempt to control the conditions by an educated guess. It could already be too late.
It was difficult to see, to judge. The thing was now lined up in a head-on attitude and looked like a white ball shining in the light and increasing rapidly in size as it floated towards the windscreen.
The organism was screaming.
Turn.
Shuddup and wait.
The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do. You don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre, okay?
Sipping his bloody tea.
Turn now.
Wait.
The white ball came floating, its high-explosive content still inert in these last few seconds.
You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between hit and miss.
Floating, dead centre in the windscreen, the fins revolving slowly in the light.
The left eye watering now, the vision blurring.
Somewhere along the invisible line that ran from the nose of the Finback to the nose of the missile there was the ideal point where the turn had to be initiated, before which the missile would have room to follow, after which the two objects would collide and explode. But there wasn’t time to measure its position visually; nor had I had the weeks and months of simulator training and combat experience that would have allowed me even a reasonable guess. At a combined speed of three thousand knots the object in the windscreen was approaching my coordinated eye-and-brain system at a relative speed of zero: the ball was simply expanding, not moving, against a background of blank space that offered no reference. The most I could do was to make sure that when I initiated the turn it was at the point where I thought it would be effective, not at the point where my nerve broke.
Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory.
It turned into mine. It’s the same thing.
You just go into a very high g-turn at the last moment.
That’s all I’ve got to do. It’s easy.
Turn. If you don’t turn now we’ll -
Shuddup.
Wait.
The ball was quite large now, floating as if motionless but expanding at a rate my eye could measure against two lines of reference: the sides of the windscreen. It was expanding very fast now, like a visual explosion. The fins were becoming a windmill.
Allow for the risk of target attraction, the mesmeric influence that will sometimes take the pilot all the way home to extinction. Allow for the margin of error. Allow for luck.
Turn now.
Yes. Now.
The control column shivered in my hands and the rudder bar resisted as I kicked at it and hauled the column back and felt the long wave of vibration coming into the airframe as the jets thrust it into the new trajectory with the stubby delta wings cutting the air and the ailerons taking the overload of pressure against their upper surfaces. The spheroid configuration of the missile sank immediately below the windscreen but it was still there and still trying to home in to the target; it would already have started turning for me, upwards and to the side as the Finback spiralled into the rolling climb and I waited, letting the mind go and the body instruct the machine. This was all I had to do. The organism would have striven to do a thousand other things, rather than be destroyed; but there was no need for them.
I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen.
It felt, though, that it was going to happen. The whole balance of this aerodynamic structure had been altered and by a factor so extreme that I could feel it reacting as if it were alive: it had become skeletal, animalistic, vibrant with nerves that quivered in the controls and the seat and the canopy above me. Even its voice had adopted new and undefinable tones as its shape was forced against the static air at its fullest angle, making a gigantic reed of its cowlings, curves and linear sections and sending them singing as finely as the song of the wind above the roar of the sea.
Information.
I would appreciate some information. Are the conditions such that within the next half second I shall be proved to have reacted too slowly, too late? If so, spare me the technical findings, the degree of heat engendered at the heart of the explosion from here inside this cockpit, the force exerted outwards from the centre, the subtler effect upon blood pressure, heart rate and cranial activity in the microsecond before the body flowers into a surrealistic sunburst, its blood bright in the sky. Spare me that.
But I would like to know where that bloody thing is and how close it is. I would like just this much information.
Sweat running and the left eye streaming and the mouth like a husk and the air pumping into the g-suit and squeezing my legs and the pelvic area as the force of the turn pushed me against the seat and held me there so that I couldn’t move. Trying to look into the mirrors but a lot of blood going down and away from the head because this is a very -
You just go into a very tight g-turn.
Yes. Exactly. Blackly, and the singing in the nerves. If it had missed the target, missed, it would have singing, nothing to see in the black, the roaring fading and coming back, would have gone ballistic and come down Christ knows where.
Look in the mirrors. Yes
but it’d be too small by now. Has it missed me, then, has it missed me?
MISS.
Good old Thompson, what about a spot more tea?
Suit getting the pressure up and the blood going back and I eased the controls and brought her out of the roll and checked the altimeter, seven thousand feet
They’ve got more than one.
What?
They’ve got dozens of those things.
Head went cold and I sat up and brought her level and looked down through the bottom panels of the canopy and saw another one lifting off a launcher a mile away and seven thousand feet down, long and thin and white with the winter sunshine making a highlight on the warhead, coming up very fast with a second one lifting off behind it, no bloody go.
They were out for a kill and they knew how to do it and it didn’t matter where I went: these things were medium range and the gauges on the facia were reading out a six-minute deadline for me on the after-burners and I couldn’t shut them off because I needed the speed.
Voices in the headset, and a lot of static.
The cockpit was an oven, baking a body alive.
Some kind of campaign necessary: a glorious ten-second campaign to prove we went down at least with banners flying and the head held high, so forth.
This is it. They’re going to kill us, they -
Oh for Christ’s sake shuddup.
Half-roll and dive. There isn’t time to think and then act: the thinking has got to be done while the action’s running. And remember the mountains.
The only thing to do was dive because I had to turn into their trajectories and their trajectories were identical. And remember the altimeter because at Mach 2.5 everything looks farther away than it is: there’s no optical illusion, it’s just that every time you blink at this speed you’re a thousand feet closer to what you’re aiming at and I was now aiming at the ground, six thousand, five thousand, four.
Half-roll to come back on them. The low hills spun through 180 degrees in the windscreen and I saw the two missiles, one large, one small, both spherical and lined up and expanding. Remember the mountains and their direction from this new position: they would be due east when I came out of the dive and the snow cloud would be still moving across from the south and blotting out half the Khrebet Tarbagatay range but that wouldn’t affect me unless I had to change course.
